new church life: march/april 2017
definition, is that in the largest sense “The Word” is everything that the Lord
has created or done, all of the proceeding of the Divine truth.
In that sense we can call the universe, and heaven and all nature the
Word. (See John 1, Divine Love and Wisdom 52, 55, and New Jerusalem and
its Heavenly Doctrine 11.) However, when it is said that the Word was written
wholly by means of correspondences I believe that it is our written Word –
the Old and New Testaments – that is meant. “By Word here, Divine truth is
meant, because the Word which is in the Church is Divine truth itself, for it
was dictated by Jehovah Himself, and what is dictated by Jehovah is nothing
but Divine truth and can be nothing else.” (True Christian Religion 85) And
who but the Lord could create such a set of stories and prophecies that could
contain in their spiritual and celestial inner senses such a wealth of truths as
to keep the angelic heavens busy forever? (See also Last Judgment 1, Sacred
Scripture 113, 117.)
We know that cities in the Word represent doctrine, and the holy city, the
New Jerusalem, is sent “down from God out of Heaven.” What else can this be
but what Swedenborg was commissioned to write? And because it came down
from heaven, Swedenborg is well justified in calling it the heavenly doctrine
and thus distinguishing it from the corresponding literal doctrine of what we
commonly call the Word.
Are the Writings then the Word? Yes, of course, they are: 1) they come
from the Lord as Swedenborg tells us several times, and 2) they are the interior
of the Old and New Testaments that we have always called the Word.
Are the Writings a separate work that we are adding to the Word – a “New
Word” as Mr. Ridgway calls it in the quote shown above? I don’t think so. They
are what the angels understand of the Word, and those spiritual knowledges
have always been inside the Word ever since the literal sense started to be
written down.
They may be new to our world but in heaven they go back, I think, to the
Garden of Eden, and certainly to the Ancient Word. So they don’t exactly add
to the Word something new; they rather open up the Word so that we can
understand it better, see what has always been there, inside, as the angels do.
How do we regard the Writings, as open, or as shrouded by clouds? Well,
the Lord told us in John 16:25 that when the spirit of truth came he would
tell us plainly of the Father. In 2 Samuel 23:4 we can read of King David’s last
song: “And He shall be as the light of the morning when the sun rises, even a
morning without clouds . . . ”
And let’s look at the “Holy city, whose street was pure gold, as it were
transparent glass” and “the city had no need of the sun to shine in her . . . for
the glory of God enlightened her,” and from the throne of God in that city a
river flowed, “a pure river of water of life, bright as crystal.”
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